


Dexter/Sinister

by icarus_chained



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Duality, Friendship, Gen, Protectiveness, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hulk/Bruce, as they and JARVIS race to protect a downed Tony.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dexter/Sinister

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt: "Hulk and JARVIS, colluding to protect Tony/Iron Man". I've never actually attempted writing from the Hulk's POV before. It was ... Um. Challenging. *grins sheepishly* 
> 
> A touch violent ( _Hulk_ ). Also, possibly bears some connection to [Held In Our Hands](http://archiveofourown.org/works/399219), of Deus Ex?

The world was ringing when he emerged from the Other, from the shaking confines of that smaller, more intimate sense of self. The world rang like screaming, and the thunder of falling stone.

The Hulk ignored it, for the moment. The world often rang to the sound of screaming, when his smaller self gave way, the dam breaking before the rising tide of fear and rage, shaking in the darkness. The Hulk stood free from it, stood strong, braced against the tide for that brief second of transition, and trusted the world to founder against him. Folding his smaller self inside, into the darkness that did not smell of fear.

He cast for enemies, for the threatening presences that time and again called him forth, that shredded the other self about him. A roar of challenge inside the screaming, to hold them at bay, and then he cast about him, sought out the threat.

He sought inside, too. Sounding the fading remnants of the other self, seeking the harm that had woken him, once, with a gun fallen to the floor beneath their feet, and a despairing regret falling distant within him. Once, he had felt that, felt the surge of atavistic revulsion, the raw fury pointed inwards, the _rage_.

The Other had not tried again.

But this time, though he turned, and roared, and dared their enemies to run for him, to challenge the power coursing through his veins and hazing the edges of his vision, though he stood in ruins and the echoes of screams ... There was no enemy to be found. Silence, an aftershock, and his bellowed cries fell into it without a ripple. Nothing moved.

"... -ir."

He turned again, roared challenge for that smallest of sounds, that whisper of another presence. There must be _something_. The other did not fade without fear, did not fall before him without the squalls of terror or of rage. The threat had not come from within. There _must_ be something. He could not emerge, without fear.

"... -ir! Sir! Master Bruce, can you hear me? Sir!"

Hulk fell still. Dropped into a low crouch, falling still to listen, against the ringing still in his ears, minimising his target to cast warily about. Caution. Like hiding in the dark, while the hunters clustered about him, emerging only to tear them one by one. He crouched, and listened.

"Master Bruce, please respond. There are forces converging on your location. Please respond, sir."

There. Buried under rubble, shining faintly under shattered stone. A small, round object, from which the voice emerged.

"Master _Bruce_!" The voice was agitated, fearful. Demanding. Not aggressive, though. Not a threat.

" _Hulk_ ," he rumbled, crouching over the object. Not Bruce. The other self was tucked away, held small and safe, only the faint tangle of his fury remaining. 

... Not fear. Fury. Hmm.

There was a pause, as Hulk carefully plucked the object up, holding it between finger and thumb. Surprised, briefly, at how resilient it felt. Then the voice, stiff and warm, came back.

"My apologies, sir. Master Hulk. There are enemies converging on you. Might I suggest you take steps to be elsewhere?"

JARVIS, Hulk realised, distantly. The invisible one, the voice-without-force. 

And then, behind that thought ... _Tony_.

"Tony," he said, low and dark, squeezing the object between his fingers before remembering he shouldn't. The metal did not bend. "JARVIS. _Tony_."

JARVIS ... was silent, for a second. A fearful, hesitant silence, and Hulk felt rage rush upwards. Not his. Not all his. Underneath it, the other self. Humming with remembered rage.

"He has fallen, sir," JARVIS said, very quietly. "He remains in the armour, that has not been breached. But he is unconscious, and does not respond to my hails." A hum of fury in his voice, too, echoing beneath the strange, electric crackle that formed it. Impassive. But Hulk knew fury, when he heard it. Even in so sourceless a being. He knew rage.

" _Where_ ," he growled, taking the voice-stone in his hand as he raised his head to scan his surroundings once more. To look at the lay of the rubble, and the way the sky still seemed to scream. 

Sky weapons. Distance, then. And the Iron Man, if struck, would have fallen from them.

His other self must have braved the area, the slow churn of fury between them drawing him onwards. And the stone ... He turned it, gently, between his hands. Sturdy, resilient. Unbending despite the pressing of his thick fingers. Designed, not for his smaller self, but for him. To have JARVIS with him, no matter what self he was. Hrrh.

" _Where_ ," he repeated, hard and low. Demand, not question. His other self had come for Tony's sake. He knew. The tendrils of fury shining up from the darkness within him, from the safety where the other curled. They were here for a _reason_.

"... Two kilometers north," JARVIS said, eventually. Electronic voice humming with regret, with pain. "Sir. There are weapons that may damage even you. You ... may have been the target."

... Fury surged, rich and shining, and something else. Something darker, heavier, tangling between his selves. Phantoms of knowledge, implication. _You may have been the target_. 

Then ... why had Tony been here?

Hulk looked around. Heard the high whistling, somewhere high above, seeking patterns circling closer. The chatter, beyond the circle of the bombsite, where enemies gathered closer on foot. So many, chittering on the edge of hearing, a sound setting his massive teeth on edge, a wedge of shaking rage lodged in his breast. Circling between him and the Iron Man. Between him and Tony.

He growled, low and savage. Remembering darkness, the chink of bottles and the smell of chemicals, and the shadows that had hidden him as he tore his hunters, one by one, amid bursts of panicked gunfire. He remembered ... _hunting_.

"Find him," he rumbled, low and ready. Quiet. He remembered quiet, as he remembered darkness. "Protect him? Hulk coming."

JARVIS was silent, for a long second. Shining between Hulk's fingers, a desperate, sourceless savagery. And then ...

"Until the armour's last weapon is exhausted," the voice swore, soft and clipped and sure. "There is a chain, sir. About this module. It goes around your neck?" 

Hulk blinked, for a second, noticing the silvery, oddly metallic thread hung from the voice-stone. He nodded, settling it over his heavy chest. 

"And sir?" JARVIS asked, echoing strangely now, through their chest, through Hulk to the other self and back, humming around them. "I will hold him until you arrive. Do not ... Let them have nothing, yes? Let them have _nothing_."

Hulk said nothing, for a second. An echoing in his ears, a thrumming through him that was only part fury, a strange sensation he did not fully understand. A hum like rage, like _power_. But not. Not quite.

He reached up, pressing the voice-stone between his fingers, a brief surge of strength, that someone had made it to bear, that someone had built it to hold. He held, for a second.

And then he threw back his head, and _roared_. A surging, tearing sound, ripping free from somewhere inside him, drowning out the high, searching whines crossing the skies above him, drowning out the relentless chatter of the _insects_ that lay between them and Tony.

He stood, and he roared. And then he leapt, a snarl and a grin like cunning, the silvery agreement of his other self. Hunting. For Tony. Time ... to hunt.

***

The world was shaking, when Bruce remembered himself. Faint tremors, running like pains through every limb, every muscle. Aches, and pains, and the phantom memories of strength, and a power like fury. As the Other Guy faded inside him, as that black, savage awareness slipped lower, into the dark places locked behind Bruce's eyes, under the white, shaking hum of an ever-present rage.

The world shook around him. The way it always did, when he came back. When he remembered.

"So," said a soft voice, literally underneath him. Laughing, wheezingly, when Bruce scrambled backwards in raw panic, pulling himself off the ... metal chest, the front of the armour, what ...?

"Don't _do_ that!" he snapped, feeling the faint, exhausted surge inside him, the curious stirring of an exhausted Hulk. "Jesus, Tony! That's _not nice_."

Tony wheezed at him, grinning stupidly inside his -extremely battered- helmet, his dark eyes shining under the dull, drying sweeps of blood. Bruce startled upright, staring, and then lunged back onto the armour, hands reaching up to touch gently at that face, fingers seeking underneath the blood and under the sides of the helmet for wounds.

Tony bit off a startled curse, moaned as he jerked his head back instinctively, and fell grudgingly still under Bruce's ministrations.

"It looks worse than it is," he assured. Not exactly believably. "JARVIS reckons some kind of sonic weapon? Induced unconsciousness. The blood is mostly from where someone tried to rip the helmet off." His face darkened, slightly. "Obviously, they didn't get it all the way. JARVIS won't tell me what happened to them."

Bruce stilled, his fingers freezing (gently) over Tony's temples, under the ragged cut torn into his hairline. Not deep, a part of his brain noted absently. Long, and bleeding the way all scalp wounds did, but not deep. 

The rest of his brain was too busy considering what was likely to have 'happened' to someone trying to hurt Tony, while the Other Guy was in command.

"...Are there any bodies?" he asked, faintly. Forcing himself to meet that dark, steady gaze, to meet the knowledge looking up at him from Tony's eyes. Tony, with a faint, lopsided smile, never blinked.

"No idea," the man said, with almost hateful sangfroid. "The armour's internal hydraulics are mostly caput. I haven't even been able to lift my head, yet."

"There are five in range, sir," JARVIS chimed in, quietly. With a cool that beat out Tony's, and an edge Bruce wasn't sure he'd ever heard before.

"Huh," Tony said, like that was something he heard _all the time_. "They all bad guys?"

"Every last one," JARVIS answered, cold satisfaction echoing strangely through the electronic layers of his voice. And then, more gently: "If it is any consolation, Master Bruce, your alter ego was not responsible for all of them. Two of them were mine." 

Tony's eyebrows shot up. There was no possible way JARVIS could have seen that, with the faceplate removed, but the AI answered them nonetheless.

"Electrocution, sir," JARVIS said, casually. "You'll have to replace the connection ports around the reactor. I believe I've fried most of them."

Tony blinked, some. So did Bruce. "Um ...?" Tony tried, cautiously.

"Sir," JARVIS answered, repressively. A definite 'do _not_ push me on this, sir'. "You were unconscious on the battlefield, while enemies attempted to remove you from the safety of the armour, in an effort to do who knows what. I did not, particularly, feel like being gentle."

... Yes, Bruce thought, distantly. Feeling the faint surge of something that felt like approval, from the thing curled inside him, the other self tucked beneath his anger and his calm. Yes, he understood that, a little. It did not dent the guilt. Could not, never could. But he did understand.

"Huh," Tony said. Tilting his head back to stare blankly at the sky. Blinking rapidly. "Huh." Nothing more than that, nothing more eloquent, nothing more intelligible. Bruce could see him swallowing, desperately, his throat brushing the edges of the armour.

"I apologise, Master Bruce," JARVIS said, instead, covering smoothly for Tony with the ease of long practice. "We had hoped to stop the engagement before your alter ego was forced to enter play at all. Unfortunately, we did not anticipate ..."

No. No, they hadn't. Bruce remembered it, driving determinedly closer, despite JARVIS' increasingly worried remonstrances. He remembered shock, and terror, and blind fury, while Tony fell from the sky in their defense.

He remembered something else, too. The distant, jagged-edged flashing of a memory from the Other Guy, a sense memory and a strained, bursting image. Black figures, crouched like evil spiders over an inert red-and-gold form, JARVIS' cold, calm tones rising in sudden, crackling desperation, incoherent in the Hulk's ears, and the surge, raw fury, that had torn through them.

"... No," he said. Heard himself say, something crushed at the end of his voice. His hands moved, almost of their own volition, and carefully brushed the drying, rusting flakes of blood from Tony's face. He smiled, a little twistedly, at the startled jerk of the man's head, and the dark eyes staring in bewildered confusion at him. 

"How about we call this one even?" he asked, surprisingly lightly, surprisingly calmly, while his palm drifted to a stop over Tony's cheek, and something heavy around his neck slid to a metallic halt just over the reactor. "No apologies necessary?"

And Tony, after a long, bewildered second, to the sound of JARVIS' amused, approving hum, found the strength to grin shakily at him, and nod his head inside the inert confines of his armour.

 _Not sorry_ , the Other Guy whispered, dark threads spreading up between them, soft and warm. _Never sorry_.

And much as it hurt, much as it shamed ... there were times when Bruce agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how Bruce-vs-Hulk works, but I think ... It's not like two people, exactly, in the sense of an alien consciousness inserted into Bruce's mind, but rather ... two different awarenesses, two different senses of self, springing from the same source? You know your sense of self, the image you hold, the bundle of impressions, physical and personal, that you hold of yourself? I think Bruce has two of those, one attached to each body. Two different selves, but born from the same mind, like that? *shrugs*
> 
> I think, at least, and I'm not even sure if that makes _any_ sense. *spreads hands*


End file.
